Dave gathered some thoughts around blogging the other day and I agree with a lot of them but especially this one: If you ever sit down to write and the words don’t come out, don’t write. Close the computer. Do something else. This had me wondering what might be good advice for newsletters based on my experience with...

Douglas Preston investigates the oldest murder mystery on the planet when he takes a meandering and jolly wander about the extinction of the dinosaurs and almost all life on earth. Douglas writes in a way that is both poetic and teeming with theories that I had never heard of before: A few years ago, scientists at...

I’m hoofing it around London today preparing some last minute things for my visa. The weather could not be more beautiful as puffy little clouds float above me in a cerulean blue playground. But as I walk around I’m entirely reliant on this patchy 3G network from my American data plan and I’m certainly not used to...

I just hopped off an eleven hour flight from San Francisco and I feel like I’ve drunk a couple bottles of wine by myself. I’m waiting for my hotel room to open up so I can crawl under the bed, roll up into a ball, and sleep for an eternity. Right now though I’m sat in a cafe and passing the time by reading week...

The strangest thing about front-end development is that it’s such a rare collection of skills that happen to be so undervalued today. You want accessibility? You need front-end engineers. You want performance? You need front-end engineers. You want good design? You need front-end engineers. The funny thing is that...

This post by Kelly Sutton all about how a new technology is rarely the solution to our problems is my new favorite thing: Lately at work, I’ve found myself being a particularly conservative and sometimes curmudgeonly voice in the room when it comes to technical decisions. There’s no particular authority bestowed...

I wrote up some opinions I have about design systems and portfolios for CSS-Tricks: In my experience working with design systems, I’ve found that I have to sacrifice my portfolio to do it well. Unlike a lot of other design work where it’s relatively easy to present Dribbble-worthy interfaces and designs, I fear that...

Here’s an opinion without any facts or evidence: I only care about making the design system 1% better every day. If that means deleting a bit of code that doesn’t have any impact whatsoever then that’s okay. If it means changing the font weight of this one component to be slightly more legible then that’s okay too....

I’ve been working on our UI Kit at Gusto for a couple of months now – this is a project in Figma that lets other designers on our team examine our components and get a better picture of what’s available to use in their own designs. There’s buttons and forms, typographic styles and colors, a verifiable cornucopia of...

I would heartily recommend Roadside Picnic. It’s a sci-fi novel written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and the book’s premise is a wonderful if not entirely ghoulish one: aliens land on Earth but leave without contacting us. In their wake they leave polluted landscapes that the government calls Zones which have been...

I often think of this passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities where Marco Polo is talking to Kublai Khan about how to approach difficult problems: ...the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno...

In his first week at SingleTrac, a video game company that made cult classics like Twisted Metal, Jay Barnson discovered the “black triangle” – a way of describing problems that are giant in engineering scope but don’t tend to be all that impressive to anyone else. Jay writes: It was sometime in my first week...